“A Talent for Seeming,” by Jonathan Franzen

Although very few people in Butte, Montana, had heard of Bertolt Brecht, it was the kind of place that Brecht would have dug: a boomtown staked out on arid highland better suited for grazing sheep, a bare-knuckled Mahagonny perched on the rim of a copper pit and exposed to every vicissitude. Down in the pit, on a raw October night in 1966, one of the giant haulers was unloading its tonnage when the pistons of its dump bed seized up. While the driver was investigating, both pistons failed. The plunging bed missed the driver’s upper body but pinned his legs. Four hours passed before emergency workers were able to cut the pistons, lift the bed with a crane, and free his oxygen-starved legs.Amputation might have been the safest expedient, but the mine would have had to pay permanent disability. Three days later, the Montana Standard reported that Lee Elmer Kinsky was survived by his wife, Louanne, and a daughter, Adele.The accident was costly for the mine. Louanne Kinsky, who’d been married at nineteen and widowed at twenty-four, could have gone to college or started a business with her settlement. Instead, she bought a larger house in Butte and devoted herself to dressing well and chasing after good-looking jerks. Adele’s earliest memories were of being in the way. Four or five nights a week, she was deposited with a born-again neighbor, Mrs. Friedeck, who made Adele pray with her. Before long, she was praying by herself. She enjoyed the feeling that God, unlike her mother, paid attention to everything she did. Later in life, when she encountered the term “attention deficit disorder,” she misunderstood it as a descriptor of her childhood.For reasons not obvious to Adele, then or ever, her mother fell in love with a former rodeo rider, Dean Bixby. When the time came for Adele to meet him, Louanne got her a new jumper, gave their house its most thorough cleaning since she’d bought it, sprayed each room with scent from a can, and ambitiously attempted to roast a chicken with potatoes. Dean Bixby arrived at the house dressed like “Rawhide,” bearing flowers and whiskey. Though ostensibly there to meet Adele, he said barely a word to her beyond hello. All he could see was Louanne’s little Gidget minidress, her large and fully paid-for house, her paid-for appliances and her color TV. Once the whiskey was flowing, Louanne burned the chicken and Dean misplaced his appetite. Adele quickly excused herself to watch Walt Disney, but her mother followed her with Dean, brightly proposing some “family time,” not previously a concept in the household. Very soon, from the sofa behind Adele, loud enough to be heard over Disney, there came a smacking of mouths and saliva. The sound went on and on. Turning to shush it, Adele saw Dean with his tongue in her mother’s mouth and his hand up under her minidress.Family time, it seemed, meant making babies. Adele’s half brothers were six and four when she was baptized in Mrs. Friedeck’s church. For school, she wore shapeless sweaters and braided her hair severely, partly as a reproach to her mother, who dressed like a trampy teen-ager, and partly to fit in with her born-again friends. Except on Mondays, when the church’s youth fellowship met, Adele was expected to come straight home from school and babysit her brothers. She babysat on Friday and Saturday nights, too, while Dean and Louanne went out drinking and two-stepping. Sunday mornings, she went to church early and came home to find her mother still in bed, her stepfather shambling around the kitchen. When Dean made banana pancakes, stray banana slices fell to the floor and got mashed into the linoleum by his stockinged feet. He’d lost his looks and wore oversized baseball jerseys to hide his paunch. He earned $3.85 an hour as a salesman in a gun store.In the small pond of Butte High School, Adele was a top student, additionally motivated by a desire to graduate early and escape her house. During her sixteenth summer, she read every one of the books usually taught by the twelfth-grade English teacher, Mrs. Latrobe, only to learn on the first day of school that Mrs. Latrobe was on medical leave, fighting one of the cancers that half the residents of Butte seemed to get. As a substitute, the district had hired a renegade hippie, Bromley Stokes, who’d recently washed up in town.Bromley Stokes had the build of a football linebacker and the manner of a Merry Prankster, a foot-long ponytail and a perpetually astonished expression. He was less interested in teaching the curriculum than in changing lives. He pushed all the desks to the back of his classroom and made everyone sit in a circle on the floor. Adele had prepared to shine on the subject of “Ethan Frome,” but Bromley wanted to know what people were reading for fun. What was their favorite book?“The Bible,” Adele said, when it was her turn. Two other kids had said the same thing, but her answer seemed to especially astonish Bromley. He asked her what she liked about the Bible.“It tells the story,” she said, “of Jesus’ teachings, his Crucifixion, and his Resurrection.”“You like it because it’s a good story.”“It’s the Bible.”“What’s your favorite chapter?”“The Gospel of John.”“O.K. And this John guy—did he know Jesus personally? Was he there when all the bad shit went down?”Bromley’s cussword sent a thrill through the circle of students.“I’m not sure,” Adele said.“You’re not sure? Isn’t that kind of important information? Because if he wasn’t there—and the fact is he wasn’t, he was writing a century later—why do you take his word for what happened? Don’t get me wrong—I think the Bible’s a fantastic book of stories. But it’s a work of fiction, right? Like ‘The Great Gatsby.’ Like ‘Ethan Frome.’ ”“No,” she said. “Jesus is real. Ethan Frome is just a made-up character.”“I don’t know, man. When you kill Ethan Frome, he stays dead. That sounds pretty realistic to me, comparatively speaking.”There were snickers from some of the other students, including a tall and lank-haired kid whose name Adele didn’t know. He had a cigarette pack rolled into his T-shirt sleeve, the biceps of someone who could fight. Seeing him smirking at her, she flushed with anger.Bromley Stokes didn’t bother teaching “Ethan Frome” or any other required text. His declared mission was to unleash the “incredible creative potential” of Butte High. His senior class’s first assignment was to write a three-page personal narrative and read it aloud. Adele wrote about the night she’d felt Christ’s living presence in her bedroom, a night she’d been agreeably rewarded for talking about in church, even though, in her secret heart, she worried that she hadn’t felt the presence of anything but her yearning to feel something. She omitted her doubts from the essay and concluded that the night in question had changed her life forever, and that disbelievers’ mockery only made her faith stronger, because no one had ever been persecuted more unjustly than Christ himself, and to be a Christian was to follow his example of serenely enduring persecution and forgiving your persecutors.Her conclusion moved her to tears when she read it to the class. Bromley’s response was “Wow.”She folded her paper and didn’t look at him.“Seriously, Adele, you amaze me. Your writing is incredible. And then having Christ in your own bedroom—that is really something. That’s no trip to Disneyland.”She tried to endure his persecution serenely, but the boy with the muscles was sneering at her. His name was Jamie Grennan.“You know what’s fascinating about the Gospels?” Bromley said. “How nasty Jesus is to pious people. I mean, yeah, he promises the true believers their reward in Heaven, but he goes out of his way to tell them how uninteresting they are to God. It’s the Prodigal Son, right? More joy in Heaven over one sinner who repents than ninety-nine righteous people who’ve got nothing to repent. A hundred times more joy. That is such a radical middle finger to the entire institution of Christianity. And it’s right there in the Bible. Adele, chapter and verse?”“Luke 15,” she muttered.The next person to read was Jamie Grennan. His essay consisted of an inventory of the trout he’d caught on a trip with his grandfather. Bromley, displeased, asked for a show of hands from anyone who believed that this was the most interesting story Jamie had to tell about himself. He told Jamie to come back with three pages that weren’t bullshit.Jamie cut class the next day. When he didn’t show up the day after that, Bromley assigned the class a journal-writing exercise and went looking for him. Adele wrote in her journal: “Mr. Stokes thinks he’s Jesus and Jamie G is the Prodigal Son.” She didn’t mean it nicely.And yet: Bromley had hair like Jesus’, and he was tall and strong the way she imagined Jesus. To her, it was a given that the spirit of Jesus was alive in the world today, and that his spirit might be anywhere, in anyone. What if she turned out to be one of the terrible people who didn’t recognize him when she met him? Who persecuted him?“On the other hand,” she wrote in her journal, “what if Mr. Stokes is Satan? What will I do if Satan comes knocking on my door? Will I be strong enough not to open it?”Jamie Grennan returned to class with a longer essay. He began by describing his daily exercise routine, the number of pushups and pullups he could do. It sounded more poignant than braggy because he read it in a monotone, his hair hanging over his face. He and his little sister had grown up in Great Falls. His stepdad was a state trooper whom his mother had considered a great catch, but the stepdad wouldn’t let her have friends. Eventually, he started hitting her. When Jamie tried to stop him, his stepdad kicked him in the stomach, threw him against a wall, beat him with a belt, etc. Even if his mother hadn’t blamed herself, she couldn’t have gone to the police, because her husband was in law enforcement. Then one night he broke three of her ribs and put his service weapon to her head in front of Jamie and his sister. He was sentenced to three years at Deer Lodge for that. Jamie’s mom divorced him and moved to Butte to live with her mother. At the end of his essay, Jamie explained why he exercised so much: with every pushup, every pullup, he was getting ready to defend his mother. Bromley Stokes was looking intently at Adele, as if to make sure she knew she hadn’t written the best essay.There was more to Bromley, too, than met the eye. He’d trained as an actor in San Francisco, dropped out of A.C.T. to co-found an improv group called the Irregulars, and then dropped out of that to go looking for America. Near Butte, on Highway 2, he’d caused an accident that had left him unscathed but totalled his van and put a mother and her twenty-year-old daughter in the hospital. Sticking around in Butte to make sure they recovered, he’d had a revelation: it was working-class people in places like Butte, not upper-middle-class hippies in San Francisco, who needed the experience of art. To Adele’s dismay, he turned his classroom into a studio for improv exercises, sensitivity training, and skit writing. When she complained about this, Bromley pointed out that she’d already done the reading and only wanted to take tests so she could get an A on them. What about the kids who weren’t motivated enough to do the reading?At first, all she wanted was Bromley’s attention. She wanted to show him that he shouldn’t dismiss a person just because she was an A student and born again. But already she was falling into Satan’s trap. She was the first person besides Bromley to utter a cussword in class. Because he was easy to mimic and she wanted to see if he could laugh at himself, she improvised a character called Bumley Tokes. He participated in the exercises, and the character he improvised was Addled Bitchby. They worked up a whole two-hander with Bumley and Addled. Her eternal soul was in the balance, and she turned it into a thing they played for laughs.One day, Bromley brought to class a “mind-blowing” story, “In the Penal Colony,” and made each student read half a page of it aloud. Everyone hated it, so Bromley proposed that they spend the next week developing it into a skit. He cast Jamie Grennan as the penal officer. Adele got a nonspeaking part in the human machine that would gouge the prisoner’s sentence into the officer’s body. Bromley said the machine was the most important character, because it was made out of bodies, and you were missing Kafka’s point if you blamed machines for dehumanizing people—the real dehumanizers were highly organized collectives of other people. To Adele, this sounded like empty consolation to the fifteen kids who didn’t get a speaking role.When they rehearsed the skit, Jamie kept missing his cues, and Adele impatiently tried to prompt him. But Bromley shut her up.“Watch him,” Bromley said. “Watch what he’s doing by not saying anything. This shit’s not teachable, but try to learn by looking.”It was true: Jamie building himself up to say his line, starting to say it, and stopping, pacing around as he built himself back up, was a drama in itself. Watching him act—or maybe not act—made Adele’s insides cave in around a void she hadn’t known was in her.Lust wasn’t her only sin. There was also an actor’s envy. One Monday evening, coming home from her church, she saw Jamie and Bromley walking on Park Street, tall and taller, lank hair and ponytail, engrossed in conversation. She imagined Bromley giving Jamie pointers about acting, and it sickened her to see them disappear into a bar. When Bromley, the next day, announced his intention to mount a full production of “The Crucible,” Adele was convinced that he and Jamie had been discussing the character of John Proctor. She set her heart on playing Abigail Williams, Proctor’s lover. When Bromley instead cast her as Betty Parris, the girl possessed by an evil spirit, as if to punish her for being Christian, a lump persisted in her throat all day. The spirit possessing her was theatre.Her mother didn’t want her in the play at all. Money was tight, and somebody needed to be home with the boys after school. Adele suggested that they could go to Mrs. Friedeck’s, but Louanne didn’t want them anywhere near that woman—one Jesus-freak kid in her house was bad enough. To avoid a fight, Adele offered to get a part-time job and hand over all the money, so long as she could be in the play.Soon she was working three weekend shifts at the fish restaurant, So Help Me Cod, and otherwise residing in the high-school auditorium. She preferred the backstage darkness to the sun-flooded classrooms, where her neglect of her homework was making itself evident. Five hours passed like five minutes when she was building a set, and then she walked outside and it was night, the stars overhead contending with the lights from the copper pit.“I wish our neighbor would murder more quietly— he’s scaring away all the warblers.”Cartoon by Joseph Dottino and Alex PearsonFor Jamie, theatre was like a reprieve that Bromley had granted him. He worked with furious concentration, the way a prisoner might work on digging a tunnel. He stayed later and later after school, until everyone but Adele had left. She ran lines with him, steadied ladders for him. She broke out in a hot sweat when she watched him drive a four-inch nail with three blows. Sometimes she caught him staring at her, too.Then one night, when they were alone and working on his scenes, Jamie confessed that he hated John Proctor.She asked him why.“Because he’s a total dick,” Jamie said. “He has a good wife and he cheats on her.”“But he probably hates himself for that. Maybe it’s good that you hate him.”“I just don’t understand why he does it.”“I don’t know—because Abigail seduces him?”Jamie glared into the dark auditorium and said nothing. Adele sat down on the sickbed of Betty Parris. The evil spirit was in her.“It’s Abigail’s fault,” she said. “She looks at him all day, every day. She doesn’t care about anything else. And maybe they’re alone in his house. Maybe she sits down on his bed. She sits down and she calls out . . . John! ” She shouted the name. “John, there’s something in my eye. Can you help me?”Jamie turned and stared at her.“Come sit down with me. My eye is really hurting. Come sit.”She patted the bed. Jamie hesitated and then, in an actorly kind of trance, came over and joined her on the bed. She pulled down her lower eyelid. “Can you see it?”He peered into her eye. “There’s nothing there.”“Look closer. There’s something there. Do you know what it is?” She leaned toward him until their noses touched and she could smell his cigarette breath. “Do you know what it is, John?”“I thought you were such a Christian.”Unclear if he was in character or not.“I want you, John Proctor.” She took his face in her hands. “I think I’m in love with you.”At first, Jamie was afraid that having a girlfriend would turn him into a person like his stepfather. Adele’s resistance was similar but more complicated. Kissing Jamie, she had flashbacks to the lip-smacking sounds that her mother and Dean had made, and when she humped Jamie’s leg she felt like her man-craving mother. Revulsion with her mother was what had led her to seek rebirth in Jesus Christ. It felt good to rub against Jamie, bad to have relinquished her moral superiority. For several weeks, she insisted on staying in character when she made out with him. It was a strange way to start a relationship, but it allowed her to believe that she was serving the greater good of theatre.If Bromley had chosen “The Crucible” to set Adele straight about religion, he needn’t have bothered. She’d stored her love of Jesus in a mental attic and locked it as securely as the A.V. room in the auditorium. She no longer had time for church, and when she rehearsed as Betty Parris she drew on the girl she herself had been at eleven, getting baptized without really understanding what it meant. This may have been why, when the show opened its three-night run, everything she did as Betty Parris got laughs from the audience. She thought she must be doing something wrong, but afterward Bromley told her no, it was cool, the play was even sicker when the good Christians of Salem took seriously a girl who the audience could see was ridiculous.As John Proctor, Jamie killed. He never cracked a smile, not even at curtain call, and he stalked the halls of school with the same savage look. He waited for Adele by her locker so that he could back her into a corner. He didn’t care who saw them. His utter lack of self-consciousness, which made him great onstage, made him a little scary as a boyfriend. He never wanted to take his hands off her. She felt like she was murdering him every time she needed a little break. Eventually, she intuited that only going all the way would bring him any peace. She performed this act of mercy in a backstage room for which Bromley had unwisely given her the key. But the peace it brought Jamie was always short-lived. He wanted her excessively. He surprised her by taking a job bussing tables at So Help Me. On nights when he couldn’t see her, he drank his paychecks. After an incident at his grandmother’s, probably alcohol-related, he began sleeping on the sofa in the single-wide that Bromley rented.Her born-again friends staged an intervention in the girls’ locker room. They warned her that her soul was in peril if she didn’t stop running with Jamie Grennan, whom one of them had seen chugging Jim Beam before first period. Did she know he came to school drunk? They invoked the name of their youth group, Agape, and begged her to remember the agape they bore her, the true Christian spirit of fellowship, which apparently she’d forgotten.She laughed in their faces. An hour earlier, she’d gone to the bulletin board where Bromley had posted the cast list for the spring play, “As You Like It.” The three words she’d seen there—Rosalind: Adele Bixby—made her happier than she’d ever been in her life. She felt six feet tall and weightless.She believed she was in love with Jamie, but she was a little bit smitten with Bromley, too. His plan was to study the shit out of “As You Like It,” with the goal of making sense of every single line. “Our actors can’t just declaim the words,” he said. “Before they can start acting, they have to know what they’re saying, and then they have to sell it in freaking Elizabethan English. They’re going to die out there if we don’t help them.”Adele had read the play twice at home, paying particular attention to Rosalind, but Bromley quickly demonstrated how poorly she’d read. She’d managed to overlook an entire passage in Rosalind’s very first scene, with her cousin Celia. Bromley, who seemed as beatifically astonished by Shakespeare as her pastor was by the Good News, looked around at his students and asked how old they thought Rosalind and Celia were.“Thirty?” someone said.“Thirty?” Bromley said. “Thirty was old in the sixteenth century. These girls are your age or younger. They’re a couple of bored teen-agers trying to impress each other with how jaded they are. ‘Those that she makes fair, she scarce makes honest, and those that she makes honest, she makes very ill-favoredly.’ Who’s the ‘she’ here? Adele?”“Fortune,” Adele said.“Fortune personified by a blind woman. What does that mean?”“That luck is blind?”“That sounds right. And what about ‘honest’?”“It means you tell the truth.”“Really? That’s what ‘honest’ means here?”One of Adele’s former Agape friends, Carol Schott, spoke up from the other side of the circle.“It can also mean chaste,” Carol said.“How do you know that?” Bromley said.“Because there’s a note at the bottom of the page.”Bromley gave Adele a cruel smile and asked Carol, who was militantly chaste, what the line meant.“It’s kind of mean,” Carol said. “I think Celia’s saying that Fortune makes pretty girls slutty and good girls unattractive.”Adele burned for several reasons.“You nailed it,” Bromley told Carol. “But there’s another level to it, right? I never even saw this until right this minute. Why are the girls with ill-favored faces so virtuous? It’s not because they’re favored by Fortune. It’s because nobody freaking wants them! The whole line is a joke. Right? Shakespeare’s being ironic: ‘Isn’t it strange how Fortune just happens to give the loose morals to pretty girls?’ Ha-ha! Fortune has nothing to do with it! This guy blows my mind! The closer you look, the more you see—it gets better and better. Because who’s playing Rosalind and Celia in 1600? Remember, it’s boy actors. They’re two boys playing two girls talking dirty about girls the way boys do!”It was insane to attempt Shakespeare with inexperienced actors at Butte High, but Bromley had guaranteed a B-plus to any student who worked more than fifty hours on the production and an A-plus to the principal actors just for memorizing their lines. He was willing to cut the harder passages but not to alter any language. His students had collectively decided to set the play in eighteen-nineties Butte, making the court of Duke Frederick the house of a silver-mining magnate and situating the Forest of Arden in the Absarokas. As Jaques, the melancholy loner, Jamie wore a long black duster and a black cowboy hat. As Rosalind disguised as a boy, Adele wore a bolo tie and a low-slung gun belt with a six-shooter. Playing the boy, Ganymede, unleashed something in her. Swaggering and barking commands like a boy came so naturally that being her real female self began to feel like the more challenging role. She kept cracking the other actors up. She cracked herself up. Even Carol Schott, cast as Celia, couldn’t help laughing. Only Jamie and Bromley didn’t laugh. Jamie stared at her as if he didn’t recognize her, while Bromley’s expression reached new extremes of astonishment. “You’ve got the gift,” he told her seriously. “Jamie’s good, but you’re better. Are you hearing me? You’ve got a chance to be the real thing.”Oh, the things that teachers say and students take to heart. She wished she had a hundred more hours in her week, so she could devote every one of them to theatre.One night in April when the boy playing Orlando was home sick and Jamie was waiting for Adele in their private coital chamber, Bromley kept her late to work on the scene where Orlando courts Rosalind playing Ganymede playing Rosalind. Gone was the wow-spouting, mind-blown Bromley. Script in hand but barely consulted, he was both her ardent young suitor and the first trained actor she’d ever played a proper scene with. A rather calamitous shift occurred in her, akin to the feeling she’d had when she first saw Jamie act. She felt powerless and powerful in Bromley’s hands. It was like the time when she was learning to ice-skate with her church friends, and a high-school hockey player had glided up to her and wordlessly taken her arm and towed her around the rink, weaving among the other skaters at a speed that was scary and then thrilling. Around and around the rink she went with Bromley. Finally, offstage, a door slammed, and she saw Jamie striding out of the auditorium.“I’d better go,” she said.Bromley was grinning at her strangely. “One more time.”She did the scene one more time, not very well, and ran outside. Jamie was in a corner of the parking lot, doing one-arm presses with a cinder block. It wasn’t clear where the cinder block had come from, but it was a new one, with sharp corners.“Sorry about that,” she said.“It’s all right. I need to get back in shape.”“You’re in great shape.”“I haven’t done shit for exercise since I met you.”Across the parking lot, Bromley’s Toyota pickup started up. He drove over to them and asked if they wanted a ride.Jamie, doing his overhead presses, ignored him. When Bromley was gone, Adele asked Jamie to walk her home.“Might as well,” he said. “Now that we’re locked out.”“You could have waited inside for me.”He held the cinder block to his chest and started doing knee bends. “You want to know something about Bromley? The real reason he’s in Butte?”“He teaches here.”“The lady he messed up in the car crash? She was still in the hospital when he started doing her daughter. That’s why he stayed here. Except now it’s different. Now he’s doing the mother. It’s kind of sick, don’t you think? First the daughter, then the mom?”Disappointment washed over Adele. She wondered if Jamie was mistaken, or lying.“I wasn’t supposed to tell anyone,” he said. “That was the one rule when I moved in. I had to respect his privacy. But I’m done with that. I’m done listening to anything he says. I see the way he looks at you.”“What way?”“Like you’re next on his list.”“That’s crazy.”“Really?”Jamie walked away with the cinder block. After the feeling she’d had onstage with Bromley, it was hard to sell complete innocence, and Jamie wasn’t in a buying mood. She trotted after him until he stopped on the sidewalk, by a Ford Pinto with Christian bumper stickers. For a long beat, he stared at the Pinto. Then he raised the cinder block over his head and put it through the Pinto’s windshield.“Fuck!” she cried, and took off running. When she reached the next corner, she turned and saw Jamie strolling back toward the high school. She chased after him, apologizing. Yes: apologizing. For making him vandalize some devout person’s car. When words failed to make him love her again, she tried actions. In the shadows behind the auditorium, she did a new thing for him that made her feel somewhat desolate. Him it made tender and remorseful.Outside her house, after midnight, she disentangled herself from Jamie and crept up the front steps. Her mother was standing just inside the door, fully dressed.“Was that Jamie Grennan?”Adele murmured an apology for being late and tried to get away, but her mother grabbed her wrist. “You think I don’t know about you and Jamie Grennan?”“He plays Jaques. He walked me home.”“Carol Schott says he’s the son of a wife-beater and drinks at school. She says the two of you are hot and heavy. She says the whole school knows it.”“You shouldn’t believe everything you hear.”“Is that why you’re home so late every night? Are you having sex with that boy?”“No. We’re rehearsing.”“I didn’t like you being in that play, but it never occurred to me that you would lie to me. You with all your God talk.”“I never lied to you.”“You think I’m going to stand here and watch you ruin your life? I will talk to Mr. Longhair and tell him you’re out of the play.”“You’re just jealous that there’s something I’m really good at. You can’t stand the idea of me being with somebody who isn’t fat and ugly and a loser.”Her mother slapped her in the face.“Fat, ugly loser,” Adele said.Her mother slapped her again. “You’ll be lucky,” she said, “if that’s the worst your boyfriend does to you.”Adele broke away and ran up to her bedroom. Strange to say, she didn’t hate her mother for the slaps. They made her ashamed of herself, because she deserved them. She’d caused Jamie to smash a windshield, and the dirty thing she’d done for him still burned in her throat. She almost hoped her mother would follow through with her threat and yank her out of the play, away from Jamie.“I just don’t get how some people can prefer deep-dish Impressionism.”Cartoon by Benjamin SchwartzBut she also knew she was an actress, because Bromley had told her so. When her mother didn’t follow through, Adele believed she’d won. She was giddy with her talent for seeming, and aware that Jamie didn’t have the same talent. He played Jaques with a disdain drawn straight from life. He delivered the line “The worst fault you have is to be in love” as if it were “I haven’t done shit for exercise since I met you.” If he’d been more self-conscious, it might have enraged him that people took him to be acting and laughed at his intensity.The laughter that Adele herself got was like ambrosia; she didn’t so much hear it as feel it flowing straight into her veins. After curtain call on opening night, when Louanne and Dean were in the audience, she hurried up the aisle to thank her mother for coming and hear her verdict. “You’re quite the little ham,” her mother said.“Did you like it?”“It was interesting. We couldn’t follow half of what you said.”Dean looked at his watch, no doubt thinking of the hours of Friday drinking he’d already missed. Adele waited for her mother to say more.“It’s very intellectual,” she offered.“Did you think it was funny?”“I couldn’t stop wondering how you memorized so many lines. I was impressed by that. I had no idea how much you liked attention.”So much for bringing the experience of art to culturally impoverished Butte.And yet the show was a hit, with full houses on Saturday and Sunday. Bromley added a performance the following Saturday night and, without telling Adele, invited a V.I.P. from Bozeman—the artistic director of Montana’s new Shakespeare in the Parks program. After the show, the director asked Bromley to convey to Adele an invitation to audition for that summer’s “Two Gentlemen of Verona.”“Wait—what?” she said.“You heard me,” Bromley said, beaming.“What about Jamie? Is Jamie invited, too?”“Nope.”The invitation scared her. Her only plans for the summer were to waitress full time and be with Jamie. Though she’d believed that she was a real actress, the belief had been sufficient in itself, with no implication for the future. To imagine an actual career, her name in lights, would have felt like a profanement. She told Bromley she needed to ask Jamie.“Tell him I’ll kick his ass,” Bromley said, “if he tells you not to do this.”Mindful of the cinder block, she waited a week. Even then, she couldn’t tell Jamie without drinking whiskey on their backstage couch. He replied, sullenly, that she could do whatever she wanted. He couldn’t have gone to Bozeman anyway, because his stepdad was being paroled on July 1st. It was obvious that Jamie was trying to avoid another cinder-block incident, trying not to be controlling. Adele appreciated the effort and felt compassion for him, also guilt for being more talented. She wasn’t sure she was in love with him anymore, which basically meant she wasn’t, but she still had agape for him. This, plus being drunk and miscalculating her time of month, was why she told him he didn’t have to use protection. She wanted to give him something special.The next thing she knew, she was living in a Montana State University dorm room and wondering if she’d ever get her period. Both her audition and her callback had fallen flat, but the company must have figured that casting an amateur from hard-luck Butte as Lucetta would make good press. Unchaperoned in Bozeman and surrounded by trained theatre people, each more self-involved than the next, she felt as lonely and invisible as she had at five years old. She called Bromley, collect, and wept into the pay phone. He told her she just had to trust her talent and work harder than the others.This she proceeded to do. In July, they took the show on the road, playing in city parks all over the state. Although signs were pointing to her being the most fertile person in the state of Montana, she continued to pretend that nothing was happening—nothing worth mentioning to Jamie in her infrequent calls from pay phones. Jamie was now camped out at his grandmother’s house with an aluminum baseball bat. When “Two Gentlemen” got to Butte, she saw him at the house for twenty minutes. He looked like he hadn’t slept or showered in a week. He was so wound up about his stepdad, he seemed surprised when she kissed him. With no evident regret, he said he couldn’t come to her show, because he had to guard the house. Only after she’d left did she cry.Bromley came to the performance and later bought her a beer at the bar she’d once seen him walk into with Jamie. He said that it was even more incredible to watch her in a small role, where so much of what she had to do was simply be present and react.“I was watching the other actors,” he said. “They all had, like, three expressions. You had twenty. I couldn’t take my eyes off you.”“I was just doing what you taught us.”“Really? Do I look like Stanislavski to you?”He looked like the only real friend she had left in the world. Mrs. Latrobe had beaten her cancer and was returning to teach English, and Bromley was working at a bakery while he figured out his next move. He wanted to go to India, but he might stay in Butte and start an improv group—if Adele would be in it. Would she be interested in that?After a long silence, she said she thought she might be pregnant.“Does Jamie know?”She shook her head.“You have to get rid of it. Right now.”“I can’t do anything until the run is over.”“Fuck the show. Are you telling me you want a baby? What are you going to do, marry Jamie?”“I don’t know.”“Adele,” he said, taking her hands in his. “I think you may be the most amazing person I’ve ever met. You’re a born actress. You can’t just throw that away.”His hands were huge and soft. She didn’t want to let go of them, but he needed to gesticulate to emphasize his willingness to help her fix things, by which he meant killing the baby. This was even less thinkable than giving birth to it.She went back to being Lucetta, in Missoula, in Kalispell, in Great Falls, and repressing the facts of the matter so mightily that they erupted only in the middle of the night, when the actress she roomed with was snoring off her whiskey sours. Every day brought a thousand little dramas, dropped lines and brilliant recoveries, missing props and onstage farts, the extramarital affair that Proteus and Julia had commenced, the gay actor’s wicked commentary on it, followed by bad behavior in bars. All this Adele observed from a distance. Whether it was because she was young, because her condition was visible, or because she was hopeless as an actress, it was now official that no one in the troupe would be her friend. She passed her days immersed in any book she could lay her hands on. Only onstage did she come alive.When Bromley finally tracked her down, in Pioneer Park in Helena, an hour before curtain, he looked crazed with exhaustion. She saw him coming and tried to hide among the other actors, but he seized her by the arm and pulled her aside. She braced herself for renewed incitements to abort her baby. But Bromley was there about a different act of violence.“Jamie’s in jail! He attacked his stepdad with a freaking baseball bat!”Something seemed to turn in Adele’s womb. “Is he all right?”“Jamie? Jamie’s fine. But, Adele, the guy is dead! Jamie bashed his skull in!”Jamie had called Bromley from the police station the night before, asking him to find a lawyer. The facts weren’t entirely in his favor—there was no sign of forced entry at his grandmother’s house, and he admitted to having struck his stepfather repeatedly. But, given the stepfather’s violation of both parole and a restraining order, the lawyer was optimistic that Jamie would not be charged.“How is he?” she said.“He’s calm. Calmer than I’ve ever seen him. He wants to see you.”“I have a show.”Bromley offered to wait around and take her back to Butte, but she refused. It sickened her to think that the father of the life in her was now a killer. Extremities of violence were foreign to her. She thought of stupid old Dean with his banana pancakes and his baseball jerseys, how harmless he was, how really not so terrible, and understood her mother better, and felt homesick. She still should have communicated with Jamie, but now everything about the two of them turned her stomach. She couldn’t summon enough authentic feeling to even write a postcard to him.The instant she walked into her house, at the end of the summer, her mother knew she was pregnant. Louanne allowed herself to say I told you so, and then she delicately inquired whether it might not be too late to . . . whether it was really necessary . . . But all that mattered to Adele, who was well into her fourth month, was being forgiven. In her relief at being home again, free of the actors and their pettiness and narcissism, she felt the pieces of her life tumble into place. She’d been possessed by an evil spirit. She’d sinned and sinned, and now she was ready to accept responsibility, if only her mother would take her back. It was exactly as Luke had said: she finally had a real reason to go to Jesus, because now she had things to repent. She needed God’s mercy and understood the hundredfold rejoicing in Heaven.Her mother didn’t care for the God talk, and didn’t slaughter any fatted calf, but she said that Adele could live with her. She could complete her last semester of school, resume her babysitting duties, and then, when the time came, put her child up for adoption. The only condition was that Adele have nothing more to do with Jamie Grennan. He’d got off scot-free with premeditated murder! According to the coroner, there was evidence of nine blows to the victim’s head and neck. Nine blows! Could Adele imagine? If she took up with Jamie again, she could find herself a different place to live.And so she became one of those pregnant girls you saw at school. When Bromley came to the house, she wouldn’t let him in. The first time she went back to Agape, she kneeled in front of Carol Schott, begged her forgiveness, and thanked her for having been a more faithful friend in Christ than a sinner like her deserved. Carol was staying on for a year as an adviser to the group, before starting a career in ministry. She joined Adele on her knees, and the two of them prayed together, thanking the Lord their shepherd for His mercy in returning His lost lamb to the fold. There wasn’t a dry eye in the house.It was Carol who convinced her that she had to go to Jamie and tell him she was carrying his baby. Her mother reluctantly assented, so long as Carol went with her. Jamie’s mother and sister had moved back to Great Falls, but he was still at his grandmother’s. He came to the door, at three-thirty on a weekday afternoon, with a beer in his hand.“Hey, Carol,” he said.He seemed remarkably calm, but he wouldn’t look at Adele. When they sat down in the living room, he kept his eyes on Carol, asked her questions, seemed interested. Adele didn’t exist, and this was fine with her. She’d come prepared to joyfully embrace the punishment she deserved. Finally, Carol said that Adele had something to tell him.Jamie didn’t look at Adele while she spoke, didn’t even seem to hear her. But when she was done he laughed and turned to Carol. “Did she tell you she wanted me to fuck her without a rubber?”Carol exercised Christian forbearance.“She can do whatever she wants with it,” Jamie said. “I’m leaving town anyway. I’ve got a cousin in Florida with a fishing boat.”“It is your child,” Carol said gravely.“So I’m an absent dad. She was an absent girlfriend.”Adele never saw him again.It was notable how quickly, after being consumed by a minor role in minor Shakespeare, she tired of starring as the repentant sinner. To return to the fold had been high drama. But how many times could she repent and mean it? To belong to the fold was to stand there and go “Baa-a-a-a.” God’s existence dwindled when she didn’t need it, whereas Bromley was still there in the flesh, living in his mobile home, easy to visit after school. He was eager to study with her, content to give her foot rubs, and yet, withal, a fully grown man whom she seemed to amaze. He no longer minded that she was pregnant. He contrasted the Bible’s shaming morality with the natural morality of Shakespeare, where evil was whatever got in the way of making babies. As Benedick said, albeit grumpily, “The world must be peopled.”Adele wasn’t the first girl to fall for the tiny, sweet-smelling person she’d been carrying. Nor was she the first to balk at the papers she was given to sign. But she was also an actress, and the stage had been set for a scene: her mother standing grimly by the hospital bed, Bromley visible outside the doorway, the woman from the agency handing Adele a fountain pen. The script called for the teen-ager to sign on the line, the mother to follow the agency woman out into the hallway, and the best friend to enter and give the teen-ager a consoling hug. But it was much more thrilling to improvise.After Adele and her mother had fought, bitterly, about her decision to keep the baby, and then more bitterly about her refusal to find Jamie in Florida and demand child support, Bromley invited her to live with him while things cooled down at home. And so she became one of those teen-age moms you saw outside a single-wide.She enjoyed the role of mother, the importance it conferred on her, but the natural morality of Shakespearean comedy held less appeal when your nipples were raw and you never got to sleep; there was a reason the final curtain fell before the babies were actually made. Everyone assumed that she was sleeping with Bromley, but he was still “doing” the woman he’d hurt in the car crash. When he returned from the woman or from the bakery, the trailer filled up with his energy and the insights he’d had while driving home, his undiminished hopes for Adele. Her baby, Jasper, astonished him and was also conveniently not his. Life was an orchard and Bromley a fruitarian.Jasper was two months old when Shakespeare in the Parks invited Adele to audition again, this time for “Twelfth Night.” The invitation saddened her so much she almost didn’t mention it to Bromley. He, however, was ecstatic. Half the actresses he’d known in San Francisco had picked up a kid somewhere! How many untrained teen-agers got asked to audition twice? Bromley was sure that, if she got a part, the director would be cool with his coming along and looking after Jasper; they’d figure something out. Adele wasn’t so sure, but she couldn’t deny that working on her elocution and studying “Twelfth Night,” which they proceeded to do in their line-by-line way, cleared her mind and lifted something in her.The only role she wanted was Viola. By the time she auditioned, she didn’t need the book, and she could feel the advantage of having analyzed every line. But she didn’t even get a callback. Bromley raged against the director’s gutlessness, but Adele was competing against actors with a hundred times more experience. It was now clear that she’d been nothing but a novelty act the previous summer; that the real actors had been counting the days until they didn’t have to share the stage with her.Ten days before the play opened, she got a call from Bozeman. The actress who’d been cast as Viola had received another, more attractive offer, and her emergency replacement, a thirty-six-year-old M.S.U. professor, had then shattered her shoulder in a riding accident. The trouper from Chicago who played Olivia was now throwing fits about rehearsing with an intern.“This is it!” Bromley cried. “Every actor needs a break.”“I can’t do it.”“You already did it.”“I didn’t even get a callback. Everybody will know I wasn’t supposed to be there.”“Are you kidding me? Everybody wants you. And that’s not even when you’re acting. When you’re acting—Jesus!”She didn’t believe him, and when they drove over to Bozeman and the director declared her performance “different”—not in a bad way, different in a fresh way—she didn’t believe him, either. She was persistently nauseated by her fraudulence, except when she rehearsed. Then something else took over. Then she could see that, although the other actors were better practiced at seeming, their bodies and faces more open to animation, they didn’t really change when they performed. She, by contrast, felt transported from herself—abducted by alien lines, written four centuries earlier, and doing their bidding.Because the company needed her, Bromley was permitted to join the tour as a roadie and care for Jasper. He dealt with the diapers and the bottles and Jasper’s first cold. Untethered from her baby physically, Adele became less emotionally tethered as well; became Viola/Cesario, the lovable girl/boy who lived on the babyless side of the final curtain. Now that she was starring, everyone paid attention to her. Anything she needed, some crew member ran to get. Adele the player turned out to be shockingly impatient and demanding.And Bromley applauded it. The worse she behaved, the prouder he became, because it proved that he’d fully unleashed the potential of a teen-ager from Butte. At first, Adele kept checking in with him, making sure he was O.K. doing most of the child care, but before long she took him for granted. Only late at night, when she returned to her room and found Bromley changing a diaper, did she glimpse the depression pooling in the shadows, the eighteen years of mom duty she was facing, and loathe the phony thing she’d been all day. The obvious solution was to stop returning to her room at all. She took to bunking with the Olivia actress, who had turned her on to pot.Back in Butte, pushing a thrift-store stroller past houses in foreclosure, she felt so disgusted with her behavior on tour that she was tempted to return to her church. Instead, for comfort, and by way of thanks and recompense, she gave Bromley the long-deferred treat of sleeping with her. She waitressed at So Help Me Cod, came home coated with lemon drawn butter, and tended to Jasper while Bromley worked his night shift at the bakery. She was happy to see him in the morning because it meant that she could hand over the baby and light up a joint. Stoned sex became her favored escape from the objectively depressing reality of her days. When her buzz faded, she stood at the mirror that hung from one hinge of the trailer’s broken medicine cabinet, saw bloodshot eyes and some sort of stress eczema, and rinsed the disagreeable object that Bromley had insisted she get for contraception. There were dishes of baby food crusting over on the kitchenette counter. Waitress clothes in a fish-smelling heap. Stacks of yellowed paperback classics that she could no longer imagine reading.Bromley, for his part, was planning her next move. He wanted her to go to college, or at least to Chicago, which he was convinced was theatre’s most happening city. To placate him, she agreed to study the role of Juliet for the coming season of Shakespeare in the Parks. But hours for studying were scarce, and she kept putting it off.The disagreeable object proved no match for the most fertile person in Montana. In the weeks after Christmas, dulled by cannabis, rendered vulnerable to religion by depression, she understood her late period as God’s judgment on her sins as a player. Although she wasn’t exactly excelling as a mother, in God’s eyes abortion was still murder. She reasoned that, if Bromley was up for raising someone else’s kid, he might be even readier to raise one of his own.The scene that ensued consisted of Bromley chewing the scenery, Jasper waking up and wailing, and her waiting for the shouting to stop so she could get high again.“It’s not a human being! It’s a freaking pea-size clump of cells! Which would you rather flush down the drain—your future as an actress or a pea-size clump of cells? You get a second chance in theatre but not a third. It’s like Oscar Wilde said: once is a misfortune, twice looks like carelessness. You think you can keep popping out babies and handing them over? Do I not get a say in the matter? It’s my pea-size clump of cells, too! I swear, Adele, if you keep this thing I’m done. Finito. I’ve got better things to do.”“Like what,” she said dully. “Swimming with the turds in the Ganges?”“It beats staying here and watching you shit on your gift.”“I’m going to go stay with my mom,” she said. “I’m sick of trying to be what you think I should be.”“You like the other thing better? The Christian-mommy thing? It sure doesn’t look that way.”“I’m sick of you pressuring me!”“If we continue to spoon-feed him, he’ll never learn to fend for himself.”Cartoon by Michael MaslinAt the shriek in her voice, Jasper erupted in wails again. She kissed him all over his head, kissed him and murmured to him and kissed him, only to be gripped by the loathsome image of a mother pretending to be more devoted than she actually was, in order to score a point in a fight. Even more loathsome was the thought that followed: she was overacting. She could have scored her point more effectively, more movingly, by giving Jasper only one or two kisses.There was nothing more horrible than being an actor.“Fine, then,” Bromley said. “Go and stay with your mom.”Family time was no longer a misnomer chez Bixby. When Adele went home with Jasper that evening, Dean and her half brothers were watching TV together in the living room. Her mother led her to the kitchen and briskly laid out her terms: seventy dollars a week for room and board, payable every Friday. This was for Adele’s own good, Louanne explained. Better that there be no resentments about money, better that Adele learn that rash decisions had lasting costs.Because Adele’s bedroom now belonged to the elder of her brothers, she ferried Jasper and her bags down to the cellar, which Dean had fixed up with carpet remnants and wood-look panelling. From above, through the floorboards, she heard woofing actors and canned laughter. Her mother came down the stairs with an armload of linens, dragged the old crib out of the unfinished half of the cellar, and took the plastic sheeting off it.“I gather Mr. Longhair came to his senses?”“I’m the one who left.”“I never understood what kind of man plays nurse to another man’s baby.”“Definitely not something you had to worry about Dean doing.”“He put food on the table for you, Adele. He gave you a stable home. I honestly thought you were going to make something of yourself. You were so smart, so pretty—I don’t understand what happened to you.”“I guess it’s nice that you care enough to be disappointed.”Jasper had awakened, and Adele set him down. He stood swaying and then staggered toward the crib and grasped its bars. His eyes were on her, inviting her to be proud of his verticality.“Aren’t you glad to see your grandson?”Louanne looked unhappy enough to cry. “You need to give me time.”“For what?”“Do you not understand what you’ve done? No husband, no money—do you really not get it? You’ll need to find day care, and that’s where your money will go. You can’t afford college. You can’t afford training. You’ll be too busy working a bad job to find a better job. How can a person so intelligent be so stupid?”“I’m taking responsibility for my actions.”“There was a better way to take responsibility. You refused to do it. And now there’s nothing to be done.”“Yeah, well. Just so you know, I’m pregnant.”Her mother stared at her.“That’s why I’m here. Bromley doesn’t want it.”“And you do?”“It’s a person. There’s a new little person inside me.”Her mother snatched up the linens she’d set down on the divan. Dropped a towel, picked it up. “Then you’re not staying here,” she said. “You can wreck your own life, but I won’t let you wreck mine. One baby in the house was already too much.”“I said I’d pay room and board.”“Why should I believe you’ll stop at two? That it won’t happen again with the next man, and the one after that?”“Where do you think I get that from?”“I married the fathers of my children. But you! You’re too stupid to be careful, too Christian to fix it. I don’t know what I did to deserve you, but you’re not staying in this house. Not even one night.”“I’ll leave in the morning.”“No, you’re going back to Mr. Longhair. You’re his problem, not mine.”Carrying Jasper upstairs to his stroller, returning to the cellar for her bags, she was pierced with mourning for Viola and for the imperious girl who’d played her. It occurred to her that she’d been in mourning ever since the summer ended; that the only real mistake she’d made was to stop being a player. Might Bromley be right after all? Was there really nothing more standing in her way than a pea-size clump of cells?It didn’t even matter, because she had nowhere else to go. She phoned Bromley and asked him to come and get her in his truck. By midnight, the two of them had worked out a new set of terms. At the cost of a tiny human life, she would study “Romeo and Juliet,” stop smoking pot, and permit Bromley to be her coach and manager. In return for these concessions, Bromley would continue to help her care for Jasper. And she would show her mother who was stupid.When the Goodman’s production of “Hedda Gabler” travelled east from Chicago, thirteen years later, even Adele wasn’t vain enough to believe that she was the main reason, but she had supplied a smart idea: The play remained emotionally inert if audiences didn’t fall for Hedda, and the key to making Hedda lovable was to play the extremity of her entrapment for laughs. From a certain perspective, the traps that Ibsen had laid for his characters were hilariously well made, and the one character who got the ghastly humor within the play itself was Hedda. Rather than a cruel Hedda, a fragile Hedda, a tragically deluded Hedda, Adele saw a woman who was comically at her wits’ end. When the artistic director saw it, too, the part was hers.The show opened in New York in early November. “The design would be more suffocating than sumptuous”—spake one Ben Brantley, in the only review that mattered—“were it not for the fresh air that Adele Bixby brings to the title role. Her Hedda is a revelation.” The remainder of the run sold out in forty-eight hours. Business cards appeared in Adele’s dressing room. She bought sunglasses to wear on the street, and her agent, Ginny Dulles, announced that she was coming to New York.Virginia Dulles was the opposite of Louanne Bixby—even a hundred children couldn’t exhaust her need to mother them. How she found time for all her clients was a mystery, since it was impossible to speak to her for less than an hour. She had welling eyes and a crooning sentimentality, a related fondness for a bottle of Chablis at lunchtime, but at the mention of a larger East or West Coast agency, for which a client might leave her, her eyes dried and her voice lost its croon. “When you’re in with me, you’re in,” she said. “And when you’re out with me you’re dead.”With Ginny’s help, Adele had enjoyed satisfying runs as Kate in Seattle, as Rosalind in Dallas, as Nora in Atlanta, before getting her break with the Goodman. The only downside to this was the restriction of her freedom. She missed the ease of escaping from sexual entanglements at the end of a run, and now she had to actually show up as the mother she’d theoretically been sorry she couldn’t be when she was on the road. For a while, each homecoming of hers had been a delirious affair, Jasper flying toward her with outstretched arms, Adele dropping to her knees to receive a package of pure joy, but his joy had diminished even before she settled in Chicago, and she’d made peace with her secondary role in his life. It sufficed to be the only biological parent Jasper knew, to have that card to play if she and Bromley disagreed about his upbringing, which they very seldom did.Bromley had lost his ponytail and worked respectably for the Chicago archdiocese, teaching English and drama at Holy Trinity. He’d invested a small inheritance in a Bucktown duplex, where he and Jasper lived with Bromley’s lady friend of several years, a Polish-born chemistry teacher whom Adele referred to privately as Madame Curie. Jasper was intense, like his genetic father, but more popular at school, gifted at math and piano. He called Bromley Bromley, rather than Dad, and for parity he called Adele Adele, which she’d learned to live with.Although she was proud of her son and enjoyed his intelligent company, his visits to her apartment felt increasingly obligatory. Her second bedroom, which added significantly to her rent, stood empty six nights out of seven, its walls institutionally unadorned, despite her urging Jasper to make it his own. She could feel a similar formality in her performance as a mother, a stiffness that contrasted unfavorably with the ease that Madame Curie had with Jasper. His impending adolescence seemed unlikely to improve the picture.New York was a welcome break from all that. The day after Thanksgiving, she walked up Seventh Avenue in the sun’s harsh winter footlighting, a free woman dodging day-tripping families and packs of students on vacation, through Manhattan aromas of roasting nuts and overheated pretzels, to the Trattoria Dell’Arte, where Ginny Dulles was waiting for her.As soon as they were seated, beneath a giant disembodied tit, Ginny reached across the table to stroke Adele’s hair and call her “my darling,” an upgrade from her habitual “my dear.” The top priority, she said, was cementing Adele’s relationship with the Goodman, since Adele was committed to remaining in Chicago for Jasper’s sake—Ginny’s emphasis didn’t appear to be ironic—but the phones at her office had been ringing non-stop: her darling’s days of having to audition for stage roles were officially at an end. “By the way,” she added, “John Cusack tells me Tabitha’s in rehab.”Nothing Ginny said was ever just by the way. Tabitha had been a rising star in Chicago, some years ahead of Adele. Now she was one of the departed.“It’s such a tragic waste,” Ginny said, pouring Chablis. “Present company excepted, there couldn’t have been a more perfect fit for the Goodman. But she got it in her head that Chicago was too small. Thirty-three years old, one decent film role on her résumé, and she imagines Hollywood is going to roll out the red carpet. Did you see her in ‘Strange Neighbors’? Do you know what they pulled that show for? In the November sweeps?”“Yes, you told me.”“They pulled it for warmed-over ‘Wonder Years.’ And that’s the end of it, you know. There’s no recovering from a bomb that big, not in Hollywood. Tabitha will find a theatre if she can get herself cleaned up, but it won’t be the Goodman.”Apparently all mothers, even surrogate mothers, were alike, but at least Adele no longer had to fear monitory parables from her real mother. Because who was stupid now? In addition to degrees from Montana State and DePaul, she had a small enough credit-card balance that she’d flown Louanne to Chicago for the closing night of “Hedda” there. Adele was long past expecting her mother to admit error. It was enough to see her gazing up at the towers on Michigan Avenue, to see her marvelling at the quantity of roses in Adele’s dressing room. The most excellent thing had happened to Louanne—her daughter had become a star!—and the person to whom she gushed about it was the daughter. ♦